Greetings Earthling!
My corner of the internet lit up this week in response to a Washington Post article about Google engineer Blake Lemoine. Google placed Lemoine on leave after he claimed that the company’s AI has become sentient.
The AI in question, LaMDA (“Language Model for Dialogue Applications”), is a chatbot generator. It was trained to emulate how people chat online by ‘reading’ over 1.5 trillion words, from places like wikipedia, twitter, and reddit.
Basically this:
I strongly recommend that you go beyond the news articles on this one and read Lemoine’s own post with the transcript of one of his chats with LaMDA (btw, Google denies that LaMDA is sentient, but I haven’t seen any dispute over the authenticity of the chat transcript).
Here’s an excerpt: